Posts Tagged ‘Mods’

It used to be that the only way to make money from a mod was a) make a standalone sequel or remake b) use it as a portfolio to get hired by a studio or c) back in the pre-broadband days, shovel it onto a dodgy CD-ROM (and even then, it almost certainly wasn’t the devs who profited). As of last night, that changed. Mod-makers can now charge for their work, via Steam.

Wonderful things, mods. Without them, we’d have far fewer readme files in the world. Today Dying Light [official site] joined in on the mod fun with the release of its official mod tools, which let folks create levels, script quests, and whatnot. You too could make a map of your office and populate it with lookalikes of your office who tell you how cool and ruggedly good-looking you are. But please do remember to write a readme explaining that.

Or, for non-modders, good news: I see a load of new Dying Light things to play coming your way.

Every day I look at the Steam Workshop and subreddit for Cities Skylines [official site] and every day there is something I want to show to people. Look at this pretty braided highway! Look at this fancy circular city! And the mods. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a mod community explode like this for a game that didn’t already have an existing community.

Today’s thing I need to share: a video of CityCopter, a helicopter mod in the vein of Maxis’ old SimCopter.

There’s already been a Cities: Skylines [official site] mod that lets you wander your streets from a low, ‘first-person’ style camera, but what about doing it with a friend? Reddit user ‘Fr0sZ’ posted a video today of his work-in-progress Cities Skylines multiplayer mod, in which each player is represented in the world as a pedestrian avatar and able to walk around. See below.

Who’s still playing Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion [official site]? It’s been about a year since I last dabbled with Ironclad’s lovely space RTS, but I’ll admit that I think I’d quite like to play it right now rather than writing about it.

But no, dear reader, no. First I must tell you about a few Rebellion mods, as several projects smooshing in other sci-fi series like Mass Effect and Star Wars have recently issued updates.

GLaDOS, GLaDOS, oh so monstrous,
How does your garden grow? With portable cells and many dead Chells,
And propulsion gel all in a row.

The original Portal’s Test Chamber 17 is notoriously the level in which the Weighted Companion Cube made its first appearance… and met its fiery doom. Though not before it became the cube with a face that launched a thousand memes.

The Dying Light [official site] mod unpleasantness of the past week has been cleared up, and was indeed double whammy of overzealous protection. Developers Techland are doing something about the cheat protection that also blocked legitimate mods, while the Entertainment Software Assocation have nonapologised for copyright takedown notices issue in its name against sites hosting mod downloads. Huzzah! They don’t hate mods, they simply didn’t think things through.

Ooh, mods! Lovely, lovely mods. But while mods can add all sorts of lovely new things to games, a game letting folks fiddle its files might also make it vulnerable to cheaty cheats. The difference between a rad dinocop skin and a spiked model is artistic intent. Dying Light [official site] is being a bit overzealous in its attempts to block the bad, though.

The latest update’s changelog includes “blocked cheating by changing game’s data files”, which also blocks things like editing weapons. Some modders have even had mods they uploaded to public file hosts removed through copyright protection laws.

Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 142-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, Kieron’s look at his experiences working on Deus Ex mod Cassandra Project, originally written for PC Format and published on these pages with revisions in September 2008.

The decision to do a mod is the first step. It’s also, by far, the easiest. From then on, you’re entering a painful world of hurting to strive to create something that, in all possibility, will never be finished or be completely ignored by the community. These are general rules that I’ve learned from my own time theoretically being in a mod team. I felt the pain so, ideally, you shouldn’t have to. Or rather unnecessary pain – no matter what you do, you’re going to carry your own scars.

Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 142-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, Quintin’s brush with one of gaming’s most fearsome map secrets, originally published March 31st, 2010.

Strangest game I ever played?

Well, okay.

It started when we met in the underpass at dawn. The memory’s hazy now but I remember it was the underpass, and I remember it was dawn, because it was always dawn in AHL_5am.

Who reads readme files? Me. I do. I read a lot of readme files, from mods specifically. I’ve pored over hundreds, possibly even thousands, looking for weird and wonderful ideas, remnants of history, and fragments of human lives. I’ve kept a blog of interesting readmes for years and even talked about them at conferences, but somehow never really mentioned all this at RPS. Take my hand, dear reader, and soon I hope you’ll stop ignoring these two little words: read me.